Why PCIe?..and not USB3 like in most inexpensive SDRs? Like with the UmTRX line, we were aiming for something that is easy to start playing/prototyping that easily translates to a commercial design. From our experience, a lot of production systems feature a PCIe or miniPCIe bus which is robust, low latency and high bandwidth – a perfect choice for a high performance embedded SDR (Look at the bus specs above, you can only get that with PCIe) plus we don’t think USB is a solid mechanical connector for a field device requiring months of unattended operation.

If you don’t have a miniPCIe or PCIe slot, depending on interest we’re planning an accessory to make it easy for everyone to use this board everywhere.

Price? Expect the same ballpark as a BladeRF SDR. As mentioned in the first post, our aim is to increase accessibility. Embedded devices usually cost premium for their robustness and durability and are out of reach for most users. With XTRX we’re aiming at bringing this industrial quality to masses.

Now that Umtrx 2.3.1 is out , we wanted to give you a sneak peak at the next SDR board we’ve been working on. We’re calling it XTRX.

Andrey Sviyazov just finished the design and here is a render against a credit card to give you an idea of size.

Yes it’s really that small! The XTRX is a high performance/high bandwidth software defined radio (SDR) board that is specifically designed to support innovations around high data rate applications like 4G/5G and massive MIMO.

We also think the networks of the future will be more agile, flexible, programmable and distributed. This needs a foundation in great hardware. XTRX is our attempt to solve for that and make such hardware accessible.